Let’s elaborate on the last item dealing with poverty in the United States. According to the OECD, poverty is more sever in the United States than it is in relatively poor nations such as Greece, Portugal, and Hungary.

Indeed, the bureaucrats in Paris even put together a chart showing how “bad” America ranks in this category.

…if you read the fine print, you may notice one itsy-bitsy detail. The chart isn’t a measure of poverty. Not even close. Indeed, the chart wouldn’t change if all of the people of any nation (or all nations) suddenly had 10 times as much income. That’s because the OECD is measuring is relative income distribution rather than relative poverty. And the left likes this measure because coerced redistribution automatically leads to the appearance of less poverty. Even if everybody’s income is lower!

The relative poverty rate in the U.S. is 17.4%, compared to an OECD average of 11.1%. Only Chile, Israel, Mexico and Turkey have higher poverty rates than the U.S.

But unlike in other publications, the OECD didn’t bother to include any fine print admitting that its poverty measure has nothing to do with poverty.

That’s grotesquely dishonest and morally corrupt.

And since we’re on the topic of corruption, let’s broaden our discussion. National Review’s Kevin Williamson has an article on the rampant corruption among elected officials.

But what caught my attention weren’t the parts about pro-gun control politicians trying to help sell weapons to terrorists. Instead, I especially appreciated the broader lesson he provides for readers.

James Madison famously observed that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” But he also understood that men do not become angels once they win elections, become police, or are appointed to positions of power. Our constitutional order strikes an elegant balance between policing the non-angels outside of government and constraining the non-angels within government, setting the ambitions of the three branches against one another and subdividing the legislative branch against itself. …Adam Smith’s formula for prosperity — “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice” — is the very modest ambition that conservatives aim for. Limited government is the tool by which government can be made to do good without necessarily being good, or being composed of good men. …The corruptibility of the political classes is fenced in by limiting the power of the political classes per se. You cannot expand the scope and scale of government without expanding in parallel the scope and scale of government corruption.

Amen to that. That’s the core message of this video I narrated, which explains that shrinking the size and scope of government is the only effective way to reduce corruption.

Remember the lesson of this superb poster: If more government is the answer, you’ve asked a very strange question.

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The OECD has embarked, in collaboration with the UN, on what it calls the Great Transition to a Human Development-centric society focussed supposedly on subjective well-being. It builds on the Green Growth Initiative Angel Gurria launched in 2011, but is really just a 21st century update of what Marx laid out as his little c vision. Only possible when a certain level of technology made redistribution without beggaring possible.

Unfortunately for us, ICT has been declared that magic technology and education has been chosen to force this nonconsensual noetic revolution. It is ridiculous for Republicans to fund but many like the idea of a public sector centric economy and society. Plus these entities give a place for former politicians to go to when the electorate tires of their nonsense.

Keep drawing attention to this OECD scam, especially because it is very much embodied in what the PISA is pushing via education to be a “competitive, world class” country in ed reforms.

While OECD numbers do not reflect reality, statistics like “45 million living in poverty” are worse, since they do not consider means-tested support.

A recent CATO report describes how single parent families in many states receive +200% of the poverty line, thereby destroying the incentive to self-support.

If a “safety-net” of 100% of the poverty line were built into the tax code for citizens [not as an income floor, but as a standard deduction substitute], financial poverty could be wiped out [obviously, not the poverty mentality] and incentive to work re-established. States would have the option of adding additional support. This would get the federal government out of welfare and let the States become idea incubators for a variety of welfare/charity options.

This cash payment to all citizens would also make a flat tax on income progressive and therefore politically acceptable. A portion of the payment could also go directly to Health Savings and Retirement Savings accounts, as proposed in Charles Murray’s “In Our Hands”.

The portion going into Health Savings accounts would approximately equal: (1) current healthcare tax deductions, (2) Medicaid support for the poor, (3) a portion of Medicare [Medicare would be reduced by the same dollar amount], and (4) ACA subsidies. Instead we would be giving individuals the wherewithal to purchase their own individual healthcare at no additional cost to taxpayers.

While such a plan would not initially reduce federal spending, it would kick-start growth and get rid of huge federal bureaucracies. Efficiency savings to the economy would approach $400 billion annually.

Millions are out of work . 8.1 million are on Social Security Disability.

42 million need Food Stamps tp feed their families. Millions work for a low low low minimum wage. The majority of jobs created by Obama pay a minimum wage which does not support a family of four.

It is time for strong leadership. Increase the Minimum Wage to $10.10.

Remove Bush huge tax cut where to date the top one percent have deducted $1,050 Billion from their income taxes. Tax highest incomes at a high rate. Top ten percent own more wealth than 90%. They have the wealth to âBuy Votesâ and are doing it.

We must revive the once mighty Middle Class. Vote to help the Middle Class.

By that metric, the highest relative poverty rates are likely in places like Beverly Hills, where poor folk earning just a few hundred thousand per year have to live amongst numerous households making several multiples more.

It is a metric for sure, but not of poverty. Perhaps an “Index of envy potential”.

But to some people, most people actually, envy is a comparable strength emotion to the presumed happiness of absolute prosperity. And I don’t mean that in an entirely condescending way. After all, if humankind had a tendency to give absolute prosperity strong precedence over envy, then all of modern humanity would be ecstatic, as the contemporary human, even in depressed parts of the world, has more access to goods and services than ancient royalty. Obviously, that is not the case if you notice that the American middle class (in the top ten percent by worldwide standards) is now becoming as cranky as the middle classes of other declining continents, such as Europe. It is cranky because its relative worldwide prosperity has fallen from perhaps the world’s top ten percent down to the world’s top 12%. Oh my oh my calamity! But this fall itself is primarily due to self-instigated class warfare and a constant move towards ever more mandatory collectivist conscription, which is the hallmark of progressivism, and which is responsible for erasing a big part of the “selfish” American society motivation advantage that America enjoyed over other societies. Worse, the intensification of class warfare and ever stronger coercion to collectivist causes will, of course, make the situation even worse. As a matter of fact, much worse. As I have repeatedly warned many times, a vicious cycle inevitably forms. The American middle class will try to claw back their slide from the world’s top 10% to 12% with more redistribution, class warfare and mandatory conscription in subsidizing the general welfare according to ability. The vicious cycle kicks in, the remedy suppresses motivation even more, and the trajectory to decline becomes inevitable.

But hey! A redistribution dollar today through the polls is worth five perpetually compounding growth dollars in the future. The temptation has become irresistible. The decline inevitable.

Of course, in all this, a big role also plays the perhaps serendipitous historical misfortune of an eloquent president that can harvest and augment this envy to his own rise and to the very voter-lemming’s self-destruction. I.e. the wrong president candidate appears at the wrong time, and the electorate falls for it to their self-destruction. Well perhaps self-destruction is too strong of a term. Simply the eventual descent of American middle class world prosperity ranking to something comparable to Argentina.

So, in the end, the American middle class voter-lemming has two choices: Either follow the proven successful distinctly American formula of selfish cowboy capitalism and keep their top ten percent prosperity ranking worldwide — by letting their neighbors in the culdesac keep their ten times higher earnings,… or… follow the OECD, copy the rest of the world, tug the European welfare Trojan horse past Ellis Island, engage in class warfare, and bring the American middle class standard of living down towards Argentinian levels (and soon to be European levels that have been galloping in that same direction for a while now). No, there will not be an absolute decrease in standard of living, just a strong relative slide in the worldwide prosperity ranking. After all, life, even in Argentina, is still better today than it was eighty years ago.

But relativity aside, whether your children get to live past the day when things like a cure for cancer may be found, or whether that may be delayed by another two decades, and die in the meantime, depends only on the absolute rate of growth. Or…I guess… you can hope that some people’s commissar of public health will gather the right committee of scientists, who, passionate about the social service they will eventually provide, will enthusiastically leave their families at home, drive by the golf course, their peers that retired early and are now waving to them doing tai-chi in the park, cross the stream they could have gone fishing, read the email from friends sailing the Caribbean… and go lock themselves up in the four walls of a laboratory to work most of their day (government consuming 55% of GDP) for the diffuse benefit of distant others.

So what will the American voter-lemming choose?

With more densely packed cities (in part thanks to ever more restrictive centrally planned coercive collectivist zoning and land use) the SOB in the culdesac has become an inevitable daily reminder of inequality (and likely higher skills, harder work, better life planning), while the privileged prosperity ranking of our poor middle class chap in the world’s top ten percent is largely forgotten.

So, again, what will the American voter lemming choose?… exactly… and you will be much better off personally making decisions around that actuarial probability and reality. The trajectory seems inevitable.

It is these natural human tendencies to envy and forcing neighbors to subsidize according to ability that Thomas Jefferson was likely drawing upon when he said that “the normal state of things is for government to gain ground and for liberty to yield”. Because there is envy in the world and your envious neighbors want to conscript you to work for the collective. America had largely escaped that fate; but no more. American voter-lemmings are now sailing full steam towards cultural convergence towards their declining European brethren. Act accordingly…

The sirens of the welfare state have broken out of the European Trojan horse, tugged naively past Ellis Island by tie-dye shirted American voter-lemming idealists. The siren’s beauty, their velvety skin, their bamboozling song, they chant the melody of easier prosperity. “It will be wonderful…”

new Hope, same Change, but it’s finally America’s turn now.

The more I see these moves toward low growth world governance, the more I believe that success in the twenty-first century will be reserved exactly to those jurisdictions which calculate that breaking free of these international statist cartels outweighs the threats and retribution that these cartels will pursue for deserting nations or those who hold out from joining.

Sincerely,

Zorba

Writing to you from an underground command bunker built by the Koch brothers.